PERSPECTIVES: Turning painful memories into gold (04/09/00)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Turning painful memories into gold

My mother knew how to say, "Your hands up!" in five languages. It was a standing joke in our family back in the 1950s.

"Renzy dogury!" Mama would say in Polish, in a mock stern voice. I'd raise my arms and she'd help me take off a pajama top or sweater. Just for fun, she'd change languages and say it in German: "Hande hoch!" Every now and then, she'd throw a curve ball and do it in English. My younger brother Pete and I would laugh at her funny accent and she laughed too. When she was tired or had run out of patience with her boys, she'd just say it matter-of-fact in Ukrainian, the everyday language in our home.

She could also say it in Russian, but that one really gave her the creeps and we only heard it once or twice much later, during those rare moments when she gave voice to the memories that haunted her: the time the NKVD took young Ukrainians ("nashi khloptsi" - our boys) to be hanged for joining the hopeless struggle for Ukraine's independence. Another memory that had her gasping with horror was Nazis rounding up Jews from the village for what everyone knew would be certain death. Ukrainians were luckier: chosen for their vigor and youth, they were shipped to Germany to be slaves. Mama escaped that fate because she had a baby - my older brother George - although dodging slave labor only meant she was there when the Red Army and the political commissars came to the village and taught everyone, "Your hands up" in Russian.

George was in diapers when the Nazis came. He was 5 when the Soviets occupied the village and Mama taught him to say, "Glory to Father Stalin."

"Yurchyk was such a smart boy," Mama said. "He knew the lies to tell and who to tell them to. That was no way for a child to grow up." By the time we were in Cleveland lifting up our arms at bedtime, George was old enough to dress himself.

Looking back, it was a miracle, really, that the family ended up in Cleveland where our mother could play "Hands up!" with us in the different languages she had picked up along the way. We laughed and never thought that this was strange. It was just Mama having fun with her children, using the material the last 15 years had given her: "Renzy dogury! Hande hoch!"

Mama spent World War II in Podillia, in western Ukraine. Our father was in Vienna with the small Ukrainian student community there. In 1946, when the war was over, he got some forged documents from the Viennese refugee network and left the British Zone for Soviet Ukraine. Leaping from a moving train, he walked to the village where he had last seen his wife and son three years before and together they made their way to the West.

After a couple of years in displaced persons camps, we ended up in Pennsylvania and finally, in 1954, Cleveland, where Tato worked in a factory. It was 10 years since he'd left a Nazi prison cell in Linz. Ten years before that, he'd done time in a Polish prison. Once in America, his biggest challenge was paying off a mortgage and sending his kids to college. He died in 1981; my mother died in 1985.

This is the bare bones story of how our family came to America. After my Mama and Tato died, I found letters and documents testifying to all this, including the forged letter of transport and the phony passport - neatly stacked in a drawer. None of this, unfortunately, had been of much interest to me when I was growing up. I just wished that my parents wouldn't keep speaking Ukrainian to us in public. Their accented English, of course, was no better and I'm ashamed to say, that I often burned with embarrassment, conscious of the fact that they weren't like everyone else's Mom and Dad.

Today, too late to tell them, I can't begin to tell you how proud I am to be their son and how much I admire the generation of men and women like them who lived through such tough times, then settled in America where, on the surface at least, they assumed ordinary American lives.

What they also did was organize a wholesome community that kept their children busy with Saturday schools, dance classes, youth organizations, summer camps, choirs. They rolled up their sleeves and went to work, continuing the struggle for Ukraine's freedom and independence in the only way they knew how, by replicating the institutions they had known in the old country and by giving their children the best education the new world had to offer. That's heroic. And theirs is a story worth telling.

That's why I'm so glad that Yaro Bihun, a frequent contributor to The Ukrainian Weekly, is reconstructing his own family's history. I know Yaro from Cleveland's Ukrainian community in the 1950s and 1960s. Recently he did a couple of articles for The Weekly describing his trip to Ukraine where he found the family burial plot and discovered details about his roots. Along with the article was a photograph of Yaro's father and his buddies in a Polish prison in 1929. I bet there are fascinating stories behind that photograph and I hope Yaro gets around to telling them. It would help me understand my own father's experience. Still a teenager in 1932, he had been arrested by Polish police for distributing Ukrainian nationalist newsletters. "Renzy dogury!"

Like others of his generation, like Yaro's father, my father spent a few years in jail. Every now and then Tato asked Mama if she could make the soup he ate in prison and she'd shoot back: "That's impossible. You were always hungry then and no cook can compete with that!"

Like "Hands up!" that interchange was another standing joke in our family. And in the family context, that didn't seem unusual either. So we never pursued our parents for details. Now that they're gone, I wish we had.

So I hope a lot of people follow Yaro's example and find out what they can about their families. If you have elderly parents or grandparents, ask them to tell you their story. Write it down. Videotape it. Record it. Do it for your children, for your grandchildren, for history.

A few people, of course, are doing just that. My father's best friend, Dr. Volodymyr Bodnar, in his late 80s and still active and vigorous, recently published an engaging Ukrainian-language collection of reminiscences and reflections: "Z Moyikh Zhytivykh Dorih" (From My Life's Paths). My good friend Dr. Mykola Deychakiwsky has also been publishing memoirs. Good for them, and good for Askold Melnyczuk who published a novel a few years ago, "What Is Told," using the rich material from the post-World War II Ukrainian immigration and got glowing reviews from The New York Times.

The refugees who came to America after the war led dramatic, even heroic lives. Like corks bobbing in a turbulent stream, they went with the flow of painful, dangerous events and did what was necessary to survive: "Glory to Father Stalin!" "Hande hoch!"

They came to America and like my father, who worked in a smelting factory, they worked the line at Chevy or Ford, did piecework at a sewing factory as did my mother or opened family medical practices.

How they came to America was too complicated, too painful to explain and, besides, everyone spoke English. "Even our children laugh at our accents," they must have thought wearily, as they confronted the challenge of learning yet another language - the fifth one in 20 years.

These people have fascinating stories and because they are our mothers and fathers, our grandparents and great-grandparents, uncles and aunts, indeed our brothers and sisters, their stories are our stories as well.

So thank you, Yaro; thanks, Askold; thanks, Dr. Deychakiwsky; thanks, Dr. Bodnar. Thanks to everyone who cares enough about the future to record a portion of the past.

| Home Page |